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If the person you're seeing ever asks the question "Who is Stan Lee?", promptly kick their ass to the curb.
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Who the **** makes a movie and while planning it is like, "you know what this needs...is some Greg Kinnear."

There's a lot of lines I feel like Shannon didn't pull off. Upon my second viewing this week I'll bring some specifics. But his voice didn't carry enough emotion or emphasis in many scenes. I hate to say "he sounded bored" because I realize he was most definitely not bored. He's too good of an actor for that. But something was off.

There's a lot of lines I feel like Shannon didn't pull off. Upon my second viewing this week I'll bring some specifics. But his voice didn't carry enough emotion or emphasis in many scenes. I hate to say "he sounded bored" because I realize he was most definitely not bored. He's too good of an actor for that. But something was off.

Oh well, loved the movie and still loved the character.

I agree. I love Michael Shannon, I think he is one of, if not the best American actor working today. However, the word I would choose for General Zod in this film is slight. For some reason he didn't have a lot of presence onscreen, and I don't know if it was the performance or the things he was given to do, but he never quite felt like a force to be reckoned with until towards the end.

I watched The Dark Knight Rises last night, and Bane was an absolute giant in that, not necessarily physically, but his entire presence is felt throughout. Shannon never got a scene like "Do you feel in charge?" or "Follow him." to flesh out Zod. Almost all of his scenes were plot specific, so the story was dictating who he was and not the other way around. Ultimately I'm going to take the easy way out and blame David Goyer for not giving him enough moments to shine.

^My thoughts exactly. His face conveyed exactly what he was feeling a lot of the time. You could tell when he was excited, angry , jealous, bitter, slighted, etc.

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If the person you're seeing ever asks the question "Who is Stan Lee?", promptly kick their ass to the curb.
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Who the **** makes a movie and while planning it is like, "you know what this needs...is some Greg Kinnear."

Michael Shannon portrayed Zod as reserved and cold, until he had his emotional outbursts, and you saw the true, underlying passion for his mission and his people that drove him.

I guarantee you this was an acting choice by Michael Shannon, not his inability to deliver relatively straightforward dialogue effectively. He made some very bold choices with his deliveries in this movie, and most of the time, it worked wonderfully.

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Writer and Lyricist of GOTHAM'S KNIGHT: THE BATMAN MUSICAL

And if I'm right
The future's looking bright
A symbol in the skies at night

It would be a lot of fun to know what it stands for since you could make an argument they implied the El symbol was tied to the hope for a new beginning by its appearnace as a colonial flag and Jor-El extraterrestrial expertise. You can see some ancestor of that family (Ken-El) staying they look to the skies in hope and taking the symbol for their own. Maybe Zod's symbol is something like Duty?

And I loved the balance they gave to Zod's portrayal in terms of his presence versus Clark's story. He's nowhere near as background or hateable as most of the Marvel villains, but he's far more rational and unemphatic than the villains we saw in the Drak Knight Trilogy. Those guys were designed to drive the film from an emotional place in their souls, while Zod is still quite clearly focused on an obtainable and sane military objective. He may get angry, frustrated, and saddened by the heroes conflict with him, but he's psychologically focused on his mission and is really pragmatic about it. If he knew Clark had the codex, you know he would have killed him on the spot, not tried to deconstruct Clark's choices or torture him.

__________________“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal."

He was very lowkey, as he should have been. It wasn't this grand royal upper class thing that Faora had nor what Jor and Lara had, he was just an average guy for the most part who was a patriot, which was pretty much the metaphor.

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If the person you're seeing ever asks the question "Who is Stan Lee?", promptly kick their ass to the curb.
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Who the **** makes a movie and while planning it is like, "you know what this needs...is some Greg Kinnear."

^ Exactly. Though a more sinister and blantantly EVIL Zod would have probably been more powerful, it would have taken the movie away from Henry.
Not that wiping out the planet isn't evil, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

Zod was going planetary killer at the end. A one man Exitinction Level Event. This was some real Supervillain stuff. I will refer again to what Zola told the Col. in CA:TFA: "The sanity of the plan is of no consequence.... BECAUSE HE CAN DO IT!" This is one of the things that puts comic book supervillains in a separate category than your average, over the counter strength villain. Can their plans be beyond all sense of rationality? Yes. But that doesn't matter. They have the intelligence or power, or both, to pull it off. For maybe the first time since we started putting these characters on the sceen in the 40's fim makers can really bring these villains to life in power and cunning. Joker, Loki, Zod.... These were supervillains as I've known them since I was a wee lad. It's a good time to be a fan of this genre.

One thing that I liked was how Shannon subtly portrayed the differences in Zod during the two different time periods that see him in (Younger Zod/Krypton and Older Zod/Present Day). I wasn't sure if he was originally going to portray him that way before seeing the film, but after seeing it, I definitely liked how Shannon added some differences in how he played the character in those two different time periods.